Developers Are The New Super Heroes Of The Cloud

I always believe that the developers are the most powerful resources in the IT ecosystem.

Entrepreneurs may dream, VCs may invest and architects may design highly scalable applications. But it is the developer who will turn all of this into reality. He breaths life into an idea that otherwise will just be yet another idea confined to a setof slides and documents. If you compare software project with a commercial movie, a developer is like the cameraman. The director may have a great plot and an enthralling storyline, but it is the cameraman who let’s the world sees through his lens. So, developers are always powerful. In the current era of Cloud, they are more powerful. If you are curious to know why, read further!

During the application lifecycle, two set of individuals play a critical role. One is the developer team and the other is the IT operations team. Typically developers complete their job of coding and hand over the final output to the operations team to deploy and manage the application. After the handover, developers have little idea of where the application is actually running and what configuration powers their application. The influence of developers to control the deployment environment is very limited. But that dramatically changes with the Cloud. Developers suddenly become important even after deploying the application. That’s because of a unique attribute of Cloud called “The Programmable Infrastructure”.

Developers are familiar with multi-threaded components. Running more threads will make the application more responsive and faster especially when running the code on multi-core processors. They can also go a step further and run code in multiple processes. This will make applications more robust and fault-tolerant. Many modern applications leverage the concepts of multi-threading and multiple processes. When developing for the Cloud, the developers have a new resource at their disposal. That is a server!Imagine the power of creating a new server on demand and attaching it to your application on the fly! Not only that. Developers can now write a for-each loop to enumerate all the servers in the virtual data center and perform action on each.

Finally, most of the tasks that the IT operations team performs can be completely automated through the code. This includes everything from creating new servers, new disk drives and attaching them to a running application to requesting a public IP address and configuring the DNS to point a domain name to the new IP. Now developers not only write code to develop applications but also write code to deploy and manage them through out the lifecycle. Does this make developers more powerful? Absolutely! With a few lines of code, they can launch a high performance cluster or shutdown the whole virtual data center running on the Cloud!

I sincerely hope that the developer community makes the best use of Cloud to increase their power and influence! As Peter Parker says in Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in